The Core i9-7920X processor with 12 cores recently registered in the Intel price list, revealing a rather low base frequency of 2.9 GHz. Mentions about the engineering sample of Core i9-7960X processor with 16 cores were also noticed in the Geekbench v4.0 database.

So, the engineering sample of the Skylake-X processor (Skylake-E according to the old classification) demonstrated the presence of 22.5 MB of the third level cache and a base frequency of 2.5 GHz. It's not a fact, of course, that the serial copy will inherit a similar frequency, but if you look back at the Core i9-7920X, which combines 12 cores and a base frequency of 2.9 GHz.

It is noteworthy that in the same Geekbench v4.0 processor core i9-7900X with ten cores and base frequency 3.3 GHz is faster Core i9-7960X, which has six cores for more, but the frequency is lower by 800 MHz. In fact, the benefits of a larger number of cores should be disclosed in other tests.

Note that representatives of the Bit & Chips resource from Twitter pages clarified the frequency characteristics of Core i9-7960X processor. In their opinion, at a frequency of 2.5 GHz, this processor only works with the activity of all 16 cores, with the activity of a single core it overclock to 3.2 GHz.